For some of the exercises that follow, these pages with text of gradually decreasing size will be helpful.
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related to near work which are experienced during or related to computer use.” The AOA developed this diagnosis after seeing an
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increase in the number of patients requiring eye exams due to symptoms they experienced at the computer. The visual stress of working at computers can bring on nearsightedness (myopia) or make it worse, and can also worsen middle-aged farsightedness (presbyopia).
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CVS is a repetitive strain injury. One muscle that is strained is the ciliary muscle, a muscle within the eye that changes the shape of the lens to determine the focus. Pixels, which make up the images we see on the computer screen, are bright in the middle and blurry on the edges;
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the brain is unable to determine a focal length for pixels, and endlessly attempts to do so. The iris, a muscle within the eye that regulates the amount of light that enters the eye, is strained by inappropriate lighting and glare, which are often a problem with computer work, and the result is light sensitivity.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
Nothing is more surprising than change, when it arrives—but nothing is more predictable. When we get into our forties, most of us begin to have trouble reading small print. The newspaper becomes easier to read if we hold it out at arm’s length.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
People who have always had 20/20 vision start to walk around with reading glasses in shirt pockets or hanging from a cord around their necks, and those who are nearsighted switch to bifocals. Doctors assure us that it’s a common change at middle age; our ciliary muscles, which change the shape of the lens to focus the eye for near vision, weaken, and the lenses become stiffer as we age. What they don’t tell us is that the lenses can get even worse—eventually we can get cataracts, the biggest cause of blindness throughout the world.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
It’s not a lack of compassion that causes eye doctors to go on prescribing ever-thicker glasses without warning us of the dangers that lie ahead. They simply feel that it’s hopeless, that our eyes can only get worse. Schneider and other vision improvement teachers believe that eyes can also get better. They say that ophthalmologists are seeing only one end of a continuous spectrum—whether you see nothing more than lights and shadows or have vision that is more acute than 20/20, you’re somewhere on the continuum, and change in either direction is possible.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
Even when your eyes are working hardest, trying to make out small print in dim light, for example, they need to function out of a sense of relaxation; this is the bottom line. This is why upper body massage is so important for good eye care.
The eye’s own built-in massage, blinking, gets curtailed with the frozen stare that is the hallmark of bad vision.
Blinking bathes and refreshes the eye, gives it intermittent rest, and promotes flexible use—for example, if you’re blinking while walking, your eyes open each time to slightly different scenes.
Unbalanced vision/movement patterns create tension in the eyes and poor vision; thus, massage therapists can help clients improve their eyesight by working with them on posture. Midback, shoulder, and head posture are especially important—if the head is habitually tilted forward, for example, the brain assumes that distance vision is limited, and it does indeed get worse.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
The eye exercises teach relaxed use:
To adjust the eye through relaxation to all intensities of light;
To balance the use of both eyes together. Uneven use creates enormous tension; the domination of the stronger eye needs to be limited, and the weaker eye needs to be strengthened. If one eye, or part of one eye, is damaged—even to the point where it can do no more than register the presence of light—it should be stimulated; the stronger eye will relax, and its vision will improve when the brain senses greater balance;
To balance central with peripheral vision. By habitually gazing at books or computer screens for hours at a stretch, we tend to ignore peripheral visual information until the periphery actually shrinks;
To create a flexible, fluid eye so that the eyes move easily between near and far;
To stop freezing the gaze and shift the eye easily from one small detail to another, lightly skimming the world like a butterfly.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
You may feel that wearing glasses relaxes your eyes; some people say they feel undressed and unready to meet the world without them. They do create problems—they teach us that without their help, we can only see poorly. They also tend to make us lose peripheral vision, since we are used to limiting our reality to what is visible within their frames.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
Of all the eye exercises, palming—a visualization of blackness coupled with awareness of soft, expansive deep breathing—is the most important. A meditation in its own right, it can relax the eyes, quiet the senses, and bring calm to an overwrought nervous system. Palming can be done passively to clients, or you can massage their necks and shoulders while they palm. It is a powerful tool. Long palming sessions can be harmful with glaucoma. Massage is a good substitute. Combined with breathing and movement exercises, massage can create a deep awareness of upper-body tension, especially around the eyes, so that the client learns to release it.
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LARGE AND SMALL PRINT
The “cone” cells of the retina supply daytime color vision in sharply realized detail. To supply central vision, the normally sighted eye is continuously moving, easily and accurately, from one small, clear detail to another—the behavior called shifting. The periphery is supplied by “rod” cells. Although our vision is incredibly high-resolution—we have 100 to 200 million rods and cones—we don’t all see all the parts of the visual field equally well. With normal vision, we see one small detail best, in a field of increasing haziness. Accepting this can be hard for near-sighted people, who often find blurriness unpleasant. Because the brain fills in what we expect to see, the entire periphery appears to have color, but it doesn’t. Try standing in an unfamiliar room with many small colored objects, looking straight ahead; you wont be able to identify the colors at the edges of your visual field.
Creating Controlled Stress on the Ciliary Muscle for Strength
Ideally, this exercise should be done outdoors on a bright day, with sunlight falling directly on the page. The next best method would be in bright daylight without direct sun. And the least ideal way would be indoors with strong light, which should still work.
Look at the pages with large and small print. Read the normal size print at a normal distance, where the letters are clear but not crisp, and not completely comfortable to read. You might not be able to make out a letter or two, or perhaps even a word or two, but you should be able to read most of it. Do not strain; just look at the letters. Make sure to blink and wave one hand around your periphery to ensure that you don’t strain. This will also help you to see well because it encourages the brain to notice more of the periphery and not to overstrain your central vision.
Next, obstruct your strong eye with a small piece of black paper (two inches by two inches) and look at the largest print. Bring the page all the way to your face until the page is almost touching your eyelashes, even closer than the tip of your nose. Read the print, letter by letter, or part of each letter, point by point, reading aloud and waving your hand in the periphery of the obstructed strong eye. Instead of moving your eyes the way you would when you normally read, you will move the paper so that each letter falls right in front of your eye, in your focal point. Wave your hand in the periphery to take the strain off reading so close. Do this for two minutes.
Figure 4.5. Bring the page all the way to your face until the pa
ge is almost touching your eyelashes.
Now hold the paper back eighteen inches and read the normal print again. This is an induced stress on the eye rather than one of which we are unaware and that strains the eye. Nevertheless, this will strengthen the ciliary muscle. In 80 percent of my clients and students, this works both momentarily and, with continued practice, long-term.
Unfreezing
It is amazing how much our patterns control us. If you tend not to move much because you watch television a lot, sit at a computer all day, or drive for a living, it can eventually lead to a frozen back, a frozen gaze, frozen looks, and, quite often, repetitive thoughts in your brain. Even if you are intellectually very advanced, you may freeze the way in which you look and the way in which you move.
If you are a long-distance runner, you may run with a constant sense of freeze, meaning that you tighten your shoulders, neck, chest, and lower back when you run. Or if you lift weights, you may tense every part of your body in order to lift them. So, a sense of freeze may be the starting point from which you function.
One of the most important things for you to learn is how to unfreeze yourself. Regardless of what your lifestyle is, you could be frozen.
If your lifestyle is one of sitting, it’s important for you to be comfortable when you sit, not just to think that you’re comfortable. You should be properly supported in your seat so that you do not damage your back and neck from freezing your posture. It’s likewise important to know that your eyes are relaxed, not frozen. How do you know that your eyes are relaxed? Simple: first of all, they blink; second, you have a sense of periphery when you look straight ahead.
Eye exercises are the beginning of unfreezing. Body movement is also the beginning of unfreezing. Unfreezing is more than a thing to do—it is a philosophy that you share.
Correcting Astigmatism
Astigmatism is caused by an irregularly shaped cornea or an irregularly shaped lens. It is difficult to describe what the world looks like to people who experience astigmatism. Oftentimes, people with astigmatism have the sense that they see several images of objects at once. For example, when they look at the moon they may see the image of a clear moon along with a shadow moon, two shadow moons, or several shadow moons side by side. Even if they close one eye, they may still see more than one moon.
Often astigmatism accompanies nearsightedness or farsightedness. Thus a progressive way of improving your eyes would be to simultaneously work on correcting the myopia or hyperopia while also addressing the astigmatism.
After practicing the recommended exercise program for astigmatism for two months, the astigmatism may disappear. It is then advisable to return to these exercises for one week every six months, for several years, in order to prevent the astigmatism from recurring.
Note for Astigmatic Readers
Beyond your program, you must do extra looking into the distance and extra palming throughout your day. Even though you do the astigmatism program, when you sit at your computer again for four hours or so, the benefit you have gained with these exercises is going to decrease. By regularly looking into the distance and palming, you give your eyes the opportunity to rest and to maintain more of the progress you have made with your vision.
Therefore, you must take moments throughout your day to add to your program. If you have been looking closely at your computer screen for an hour, take some time and look into the distance. Palm two or three times a day, for no less than six minutes each time, but don’t forget to blink and to breathe freely and deeply.
Exercise Program for Astigmatism
• Sunning: 10 minutes daily.
• Palming: 12 minutes minimum, 6 minutes at a time.
• Headlines: 20 minutes daily.
• Glow in the Dark: 20 minutes daily.
Extra Exercises for Astigmatism
Headlines
Note: If you are farsighted, this is a great exercise to practice before starting to work on your other exercises.
For this exercise, you will need an eye chart taped to the wall at eye level, your cheap sunglasses with the lens on the strong eye’s side covered with opaque tape, and the page with large and small print or a newspaper with a large-print headline.
Stand at a distance from the eye chart so that you can see the top third of the chart clearly without much straining, but you have to strain to see the bottom two-thirds. Basically, you are going to look at the eye chart while quickly waving the headlines in front of your face. Look past the blur of the headlines being waved in your face and try to read the eye chart. Every few seconds, stop waving the headlines and look quickly at them. Blurt out the first letter you see clearly. Now wave the page back and forth again and go back to reading the eye chart. The object is to quickly shift your focus from far to near and back to far again.
Figure 4.6. Headlines exercise for astigmatism.
If you have a partner with whom to practice these exercises, you can do this exercise a little differently. While you are reading the eye chart, your partner can flash fingers in front of your face, very close to your eyes, and you can tell your partner how many fingers he or she is holding up. Of course, this method is not good if you are by yourself because you cannot surprise yourself with your own fingers!
So when you are practicing by yourself, pick up the page with the large headline and quickly wave it back and forth in front of your eyes while looking at the chart. Read the chart aloud even if all you can read is the first three lines; do so repeatedly. Now for less than half a second, stop waving the headlines, look at the large print, and say the first letter you can see. If you are in a phase of half-guessing and half-seeing because of the speed, that’s exactly where you want you to be. Then return to waving the page back and forth.
Figure 4.7. Variation on the headlines exercise for astigmatism.
Let’s say that you are reading the letters on the top line of the eye chart. As you wave the piece of paper with the headline back and forth in front of your face, you might see the words “moving economy” in your periphery. What you want to do is to wave the paper so quickly that when you stop you may only see “e”; then you keep waving it and say the letter “e” as you return your gaze to the chart and read the top line of letters once again. Then you stop waving the paper, and you may see the letter “c” or the letter “o.” Announce it aloud; then wave the paper and read the top line of the chart again. It is good to speak with a loud voice as you do these eye exercises, as it helps to distract yourself from focusing on the exercise itself. This will make it much more effective.
The next phase is to improve your near vision by trying this same exercise reading the large and small print on this page–this page. This way, you are working with the eye chart to improve your eyesight for distant objects and with the large and small print pages for objects nearby.
Now put on your cheap sunglasses with the strong eye’s side covered with opaque tape. Again wave the paper with the large print in front of your weaker eye while looking at the chart. Read the top line of the chart aloud while waving the headline back and forth in front of your face. From time to time, stop waving the headlines in front of your face for half a second, enough time to guess a letter that you see. After ten times of doing this, look at the chart with your weak eye, but without waving the headline in the air. You may be able to clearly read an extra line on the chart. Then take off the glasses, and you may be able to clearly read two extra lines on the chart.
Glow in the Dark
Note: We do this exercise because we want the eye to move around. We have found, in our experience, that many people have an easier time moving their eyes in a rotating motion in the dark.
The idea is to follow the glowing objects with your eye, not by moving your whole head. Move your eyes only, so that your eye muscles are stretching. The stretching motion changes the structure of the eyes with time. People say the cornea cannot change shape, but they are wrong.
For this exercise, you will need a glow-in-
the-dark ball, a dark room, and a strip of paper to tape to your nose. The paper should stretch from the top of your forehead to the bottom of your chin, the same as in the Melissa exercise mentioned earlier in this book and also in the next chapter.
Eventually this exercise gets simple, but it’s difficult to master at first. All you do is tape the paper to your forehead and to your chin, turn the lights off in your room, and play catch with the glowing ball. Throw the ball from hand to hand so that the ball crosses the visual plane in front of your face. It should disappear briefly as it passes the paper taped to your head. You can also practice bouncing the ball off the wall, throwing it with one hand and catching it with the other. Remember not to move your whole head to track the location of the ball. Move only your eyeballs so that they can stretch through their full range of motion in both directions.
Imagine doing curls with your biceps but only bending your arms a little bit. You would not be getting the full benefit of the exercise, and you may even damage the very part of your body you are attempting to build up. This idea is the same when it comes to your eyes. Exercise the eye muscles by watching the glowing ball in the dark and moving your eyes through the full range of their possible motion; this will stretch, and even change, the shape of your cornea over time.
Chapter 5
Overcoming Cross-Sightedness and Lazy Eye
Correcting Cross-Sightedness
Amblyopia and strabismus are both terms for cross-sightedness, and they have something in common. They both refer to a “lazy eye,” but with amblyopia the eyes do not look cross-sighted from the outside. With strabismus, however, the eyes actually look crossed.
I have heard people sometimes joke that strabismus is when one eye is so beautiful that the other eye just wants to look at it all the time! It is okay to have a sense of humor. And this really is true: every part of you is beautiful, even your strabismus!
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